Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A monument erected in honor of a dead person whose remains lie elsewhere.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun An empty tomb erected in honor of some deceased person; a sepulchral monument erected to one who is buried elsewhere.
- To honor or commemorate with a cenotaph.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun An empty tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person who is buried elsewhere.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A
monument erected tohonour thedead whose bodies lie elsewhere; especially members of thearmed forces who died inbattle .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a monument built to honor people whose remains are interred elsewhere or whose remains cannot be recovered
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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A cenotaph is a monument erected to the memory of one dead, but not marking the spot in which his remains rest.
Classic French Course in English William Cleaver Wilkinson
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Over the cenotaph is his bust, and a representation of his first telescope.
The South of France—East Half C. B. Black
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A cenotaph is a memorial built to one who is buried elsewhere.
The Literary World Seventh Reader Hetty Sibyl Browne 1907
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Near the cenotaph is a marble pillar on which once was set the Koh-i-noor diamond, chief of Akbar's treasures.
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To be technical about it, that's not his tombstone, it's a cenotaph (A cenotaph is a tomb or a monument erected in honor of a person or group of persons whose remains are elsewhere) as the only thing found of Capt.
Reasoned Audacity 2009
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It wasn't until 1934 that then commissioner Cortlandt Starnes requested that a memorial tablet, later known as the cenotaph, be built to honour regular members who were killed in the line of duty.
The Prince Albert Daily Herald: News By Jennifer Graham 2009
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Mr. Critchlow, being unfamiliar with the word "cenotaph," consulted Worcester's Dictionary, and when he found that it meant
The Old Wives' Tale Arnold Bennett 1899
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= "-- We are told that a cenotaph is a monument" in memory of one buried elsewhere "-- otherwise," an empty tomb. "
The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers Various 1904
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"cenotaph" and our own, into unimagined aerial spaces.
Visions and Revisions A Book of Literary Devotions John Cowper Powys 1917
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Looking up she notice one of the tiles from the cenotaph missing and realized she was staring at the remains of the letter “Z” from the word “lazy”.
Archive 2009-05-01 ____Maggie 2009
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For instance, his gravestone was actually a cenotaph, a stone with his name on it but no body buried underneath.
Headless torso found in cave identified as murderer who escaped jail in 1916 Associated Press in Boise, Idaho 2020
seanahan commented on the word cenotaph
"The pair of young German professors spelunking with their electric torches in the rafters of the Old-New Synagogue, or Altneuschul, had, as it happened, gone away disappointed; for the attic under the stair-stepped gable's of the old Gothic synagogue was a cenotaph".
"The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", Michael Chabon, p39
August 10, 2007
chained_bear commented on the word cenotaph
"My mother says that in Grand Falls he marched, with a bad limp, in the Memorial Day parades to the cenotaph. ... And frequently he woke, bellowing into the night on Junction Road, from nightmares of a horse and a munitions wagon sinking into a sea of mud while ahead of him a trench of defenceless Newfoundlanders shouted for Transport until, one by one, their shouts became strangled gurgles and then stopped."
—David Macfarlane, The Danger Tree, 89
May 6, 2008
qms commented on the word cenotaph
Memorializing lost friends
The clamor of laughter ascends:
Let drinks that we quaff
Be their cenotaph.
Fond recall's a marker that mends.
August 26, 2017